Simply by Natasha

Everything looks so green and glorious today. So luscious in color and smell. The rain has done wonders.

I went to Inlet Park, after dropping Nathan off at the train station, so that I could get some pictures done for Instagram. It was a beautiful morning! I saw some ducks crossing the road, some deer crossing the road, and so many geese flying over. I am so grateful to be where I can see and hear so much nature.

The pictures you are seeing on my post today are showing a flannel by Dirty South Vintage. For 10% off on their site, click on the pictures and it will take you directly there, along with automatically giving you 10% off.

I was able to take a walk today too. The air is pretty good right now, for which I am so grateful.

After I blog, I'll be making raspberry jam. It's a freezer jam recipe that you can find in the CERTO box. It's delicious! I'm making enough to last the year. It's pretty expensive though. The raspberries are over the price they were last year by a lot, lemons are $.67 each, and sugar is $3.38 for 10 lbs this year...generic sugar. Prices on everything have gotten out of control. Wages have not increased, so that puts a strain on everyone's family. Crazy times.

We were thinking about selling our house because our neighborhood is such a pain to get in and out of with traffic now (we built in 2006), and we are not happy with the way the city has been managed and has been making decisions. Plus, our utilities are amazingly high.

Now, we are just going to stick it out because the people that have been selling recently in our neighborhood are not having as easy of time selling, and the price of houses (we would need a place to live) has gone up so much that we would get a crappy house with no land for around $400K, and there are not even very many of those in that low of price.

So, now we need to fix some things and just fix them so that we can enjoy them, not so that we can sell. That changes how we fix some of these things. As anyone who has lived in a house for this many years knows, things need fixing after this long. However, since we built at the height of the busy building boom, there are things that didn't get done well, so they need much more help than if it was built at other times.

Just about everyone who built during the time we built (in our neighborhood) has had their showers and tubs become unusable without major overhauls. The tiles began just kinda falling off the walls. So, that is one of the first things we will take care of. There is a laundry list, however.

Again, how grateful I am to have a home for myself and my family to live in. We are some of the blessed ones. There are so many people out there without the things that we take for granted. I am so grateful to have everything I have.

...continued from last post...

I continued to work for the same place for quite a while. I was there from the time they opened their doors (at least the office in Illinois). I was one of the first to be hired.

One day, I came to work excited (as usual) to spend another day with my work family. I drove into the parking lot and, while looking for a parking space, I noticed that there were a bunch of moving boxes stacked outside the door of the office building back entrance. That was another door to our office. I kinda got a sinking feeling, but didn't really know why...that is, until I entered our office.

Word got to me right away that our office was being closed. Was our boss aware? Why wouldn't we get warned so that we could get a job? What was I going to do for work? How was I going to pay my bills? Things just started to collapse around me. I felt like I was just having another bad nightmare.

When it was my turn to get called into the conference room, I was told that they were closing the doors and I was given my severance check for two weeks of pay. I didn't have nice things to say to the 'corporate' people who delivered the news. They said that my boss was on a plane flight to SLC (to their offices) when they went out to ours, but that he did know.

I felt betrayed. I trusted my boss and his wife like they were my parents. Maybe that was my mistake. I was too trusting. Why wouldn't they have told me? Didn't they even care? I couldn't breathe. I felt the walls closing in on me. It didn't seem real.

My work family and I all went to the unemployment offices that day. All of us were there together and then went out to drink together that afternoon. It was a tough time for everyone, but for some of us, it was like it was the end of our world.

I still miss the times with my work family. We had fun in the office and out of the office. It was the best job I ever had for that very reason. They became family and I have never stopped thinking of them as family since.